Music and Language in the Human Brain: Mismatch Negativity Evidence for Their Neuroplasticity and Interplay

We live in an auditory world; we perceive and memorize sounds even before birth. Here, I have reviewed findings on the effects of implicit and explicit learning on auditory neurocognition. These findings, investigated in the mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm, indicate that both implicit and explicit auditory expertise can modulate the neural encoding of sounds at the preattentive level of human cognition. This modulation is reflected in the MMN parameters latency and amplitude and its generators. Thus, studies on MMN can illustrate various forms of human auditory learning during development and learning across the entire lifespan.